How awful! I hope you and the other community members are able to stop them from doing this.

We have a stupid law here called "eminent domain" whereby the government can take land from anyone, anywhere and at any time for its own personal use. This includes farm land, natural areas as well as areas that are already occupied by homes and businesses. For example "restaurant row" in my town will be taken by eminent domain in the coming moths so that the highway can be widened. Usually the law is used for things like highways and oil pipelines etc.

But there was an instance in a town not far from me where the city bought out an entire housing development that had been around more than 30 years and the residents of which were mostly elderly and low income, paid them pennies on the dollar what their homes were worth, and why did they take the land you ask? To build A FOOTBALL STADIUM!!!! Seriously never been more livid in my life.

Keep fighting! I hope you win!!! It looks like a beautiful area!

How awful! It's happening everywhere, unfortunately. We are facing a similar issue with a field to be developed for housing.

If the land is going to be used for sand and gravel extraction then at a guess its going to be one of the big players like Hanson Aggregates or Lafarge.Problem with these two is that they have so much influence that most local councils bend over backwards to make sure they're arent any hurdles because they generate a heck load of revenue for the area.In their defence though-they do eventually make the area a wildlife habitat by planting hundreds of trees,shrubs etc and making paths for walkers.Sometimes they backfill the excavations with subsoil afterwards and eventually you wouldnt even know anything had gone on there.

Here in Cambridgeshire,they've been excavating sand & gravel for last 100 odd years in various sites because theres an awful lot of the stuff under our feet.As a result there are a lot of lakes and wildlife areas too.Heres a link to what can happen when done right-the RSPB bought these couple years back.

http://www.rspb.org.uk/reserves/guid...kes/index.aspx

However,most are worked over a 10,20 or even 30year period so you'd have to live with it for quite some time.Keep fighting!

sadly those in power dont give one iota for the coservation of greenspaces, this is an all to familiar story..its happening near me, closing 3 schools, flogging the land for housing and building a superschool on about the only decent bit of greenery near me (demolishing the local leisure centre in the process, as well as telling rugby & football teams to find somewhere else to play) 500+ mature trees will be felled!. people have fought a long campaign against this, guess what, they lost! its all back handers and back slaps imo cash,cash,cash is all they are interested in, storys like yours make me feel totally sick to the stomache.

Thanks for the info everyone, I've been given different people to contact, and support from various places, so thank you for listening, and theres a reason why I like bull terriers so much, both of us are stubborn, so I'll fight this as much as I can and hope that some good comes out of it. And looking through to see what channels can be gone through right now, I'm sure that you haven't heard the last of it here.

I've also just found a group on FB about it, called the PAGE campaign, I haven't signed up to this site yet, but I may have to, just to join the group.

And heres a website, it seems for a long time they have been succesful, but now its become more difficult.

http://www.pagecampaign.org/